ANTIQUES

ANTIQUES; Stamps That Helped Bind a Nation

By Elizabeth Olson

Published: March 14, 2003

WASHINGTON, March 13—
Daniel Webster is celebrated for his oratory and his patriotism, but he is not as well remembered for pushing his fellow congressmen to adopt a United States postage stamp. As soon as England's famed one-cent stamp, the ''penny black,'' appeared in 1840, Webster tried to revamp the way letters were sent in the United States and its territories. At the time, posting a letter was prohibitively expensive: about 25 cents in an era when the average laborer earned $1 a day.

It took seven years for Congress to authorize postal stamps, which began to make national delivery a viable proposition. In 1847 the first two adhesive stamps -- with Benjamin Franklin on the 5-cent one and George Washington on the 10-cent -- were issued, and for the first time a letter could be sent from one American coast to the other.

''When California became a state, these stamps became a symbol of a nation that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific,'' said Allen Kane, director the National Postal Museum in Washington, where the country's first official stamps, called the 1847's, are on display. The exhibition is titled ''America's First Stamps: The 1847's'' and runs through June 9 at the museum, which is in the Old City Post Office Building, next to Union Station.

In the 19th century the idea of a national post office and reliable mail delivery was in its infancy. Americans, like the British, based the cost of a letter on how far it traveled and the number of sheets of stationery. (Envelopes were extra.) The local postmaster had to keep track of each letter, laboriously recording it in a ledger.

Most troublesome was that many letters were sent collect: not infrequently the recipient did not want to, or couldn't, pay the postage and so the postal service had to assume the costs of delivery. Sometimes letters were marked with secret codes on the outside so the recipient could read the message, then refuse to accept and pay for the letter.

The National Postal Museum's exhibition shows stamps on ''covers'': folded letter sheets (similar to today's air mail stationery, where the address is on the outside flap) or the more rare envelopes. Bearing feathery 150-year-old script, the letters include some early elaborate Valentines, which help show ''what life was like in this country during the first half of the 19th century,'' said Thomas Alexander, a retired lawyer in Kansas City, Mo., who is an expert on the 1847 stamps and helped organize the exhibition.

Even though Benjamin Franklin was the nation's first postmaster general, he almost didn't make it onto the first stamp. The government's first preference was Andrew Jackson, according to a letter from the New York engraver, who sent Franklin's portrait along instead. The proofs from the nation's two earliest stamps are included in the exhibition.

Because using stamps was not mandatory in 1847, letters bearing them made up only about 2 percent of the total volume of mail. The central postal service, in fact, usually provided stamps only to the big post offices in New York, Baltimore, Boston and Philadelphia.

The mail system was anything but uniform. In addition to private mail services, most of the country's 15,000 post offices had their own ''town mark,'' which could be hand written or stamped. The Buffalo post office, for example, used a distinctive oval to show the month, day and location. Oddly, most towns did not mark the year, leaving philatelist sleuths to figure out that information.

Letters also were marked to show how they were sent, and it was often by steamboat. By Dec. 29, 1847, Henry David Thoreau wrote to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, ''However slow the steamer, no time intervenes between the writing and reading of thoughts, but they come freshly to the most distant ports.''

The 1847's lasted only four years, until postal rates were cut to 3 cents and the country's first stamps needed to be replaced. Yet most postmasters still honored the first stamps for several years and there are post-1851 letters that bear the stamps. Thrifty Americans cut some of the 10-cent stamps on the diagonal when they wanted to send a 5-cent letter, and some examples of those are in the exhibit.

The short life span of the 1847 stamps makes them costly, especially when buying covers that bear multiple stamps. One letter on display, posted from Fredonia, N.Y., with four 1847 George Washington stamps, is estimated to be worth about $250,000.

The Fredonia letter is among 140 covers on view, the largest grouping of 1847 covers ever publicly displayed, according to the museum. Only one-third of one percent of the 1847 stamps are believed to have survived on covers. Many were discarded or destroyed, experts say, but some are yet to be found. The exhibition's collection is on loan from a Swiss collector, Guido Craveri, who also serves on the museum's advisory council.

The scion of a wealthy Lugano family, Mr. Craveri dropped out of university at 20 to build a stamp auctioning business. At the suggestion of a friend, he began to acquire the 1847's two decades ago, when few people were collecting them.

''Covers are part of postal history,'' Mr. Craveri said in an interview at the museum. ''They are the first sign of unification of the United States. Before, someone in San Francisco and someone in New York didn't even have bank notes in common.'' This is the first time he has lent examples from his collection of 1,200 covers.

Mr. Craveri usually keeps his collection in a bank vault, in notebooks organized for his own enjoyment. For this show they were brought over the Atlantic Ocean in specially designed containers, and they have been mounted in glass cases.

The National Postal Museum, at 2 Massachusetts Avenue NE, is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission is free. Information: (202) 357-2991 or www.si.edu/postal.

Photo: Issued in 1847: An envelope with 2 10-cent Washington stamps and a 5-cent Franklin, at the National Postal Museum in Washington. (Associated Press)